The Truth About War History

It is possible to have more than one interpretation of history. Whether that history is one of your darkest skeletons or that of cataclysmic world events, your perspective shapes the truth of what occurred.

The waters get murkier as external influences interfere, adding another dimension replete with its own agenda. The same events, therefore, can have multiple histories.

World War Two, and in particular the European Theatre of that calamity, created a new international map drawn by the triumphant Allied Forces. Within the confines of what became the most devastating world event in terms of human suffering, were sidebar episodes, no less shameful, no less tragic, and no less evil than the war itself.

Estimates of 50 million killed during World War Two were widely held as a reasonably accurate estimate. However, that figure was established long before news of atrocities emerged from Russia and Asia that easily double that estimate. Shrouded in secrecy in a pre-internet era, totalitarian rulers could conduct mass murder to their heart’s content.

During times of war, morality and humanity rarely take center stage. Often used as an excuse, war itself becomes the reason to violate man’s basic tenants, setting neighbor against neighbor, and dredging up disagreements from antiquity based on perception.

World history is unfortunately rich with examples of holocausts. In more modern times, euphemisms such as ethnic cleansing are substituted, presumably to reserve the former for what the Jewish people and others experienced under Nazi occupation. Or perhaps we do so in an effort to put lipstick on a pig. Regardless of the term used, the practice of exterminating a people based on whatever criterion is not a new concept. Nor is the ideology passé.

We tend to use the Nazi regime as a benchmark due to its chronological proximity. Either we, or someone close to us, were personally affected by World War Two. The other primary reason Nazi atrocities are often cited is the amount of propaganda and profile that it received, and continues to receive by the likes of scholars and Hollywood. Contrast this with the equally grave atrocities being committed in the very same time period by such nations as Russia, China, and Japan, little of which is studied or discussed with the same veracity today, even by direct descendants of their respective victims.

Too, the glare of the Nazi atrocities continues to blind us to those abominations occurring today, particularly if those ethnic cleansings are of those where we are not fully vested, or from where our attentions are purposefully diverted. In an attempt to rationalize, we ask ourselves, How can we equate today’s holocausts within the framework of what we have been taught by the horrors of World War Two?

As in our private lives, we like to tuck our collective ugly history into neatly compartmentalized crates, out of sight, out of mind. Perhaps that is why the old adage of history repeating itself is so accurate.

Rarely do wars solve anything. They merely create another historic chapter in which to arm one side with enough desire for retribution to rile the minions into a frenzy fevered enough to ignore humanity and morality yet again.